ood triumphant. He looked at it. As he might be!
What wonder, if it blinded him to delirium,--the madness that underlies
all revolution, all progress, and all fall?

You laugh at the shallow temptation? You see the error underlying
its argument so clearly,--that to him a true life was one of full
development rather than self-restraint? that he was deaf to the higher
tone in a cry of voluntary suffering for truth's sake than in the
fullest flow of spontaneous harmony? I do not plead his cause. I only
want to show you the mote in my brother's eye: then you can see clearly
to take it out.

The money,--there it lay on his knee, a little blotted slip of paper,
nothing in itself; used to raise him out of the pit; something straight
from God's hand. A thief! Well, what was it to be a thief? He met the
question at last, face to face, wiping the clammy drops of sweat
from his forehead. God made this money--the fresh air, too--for his
children's use. He never made the difference between poor and rich. The
Something who looked down on him that moment through the cool gray sky
had a kindly face, he knew,--loved his children alike. Oh, he knew that!

There were times when the soft floods of color in the crimson and purple
flames, or the clear depth of amber in the water below the bridge, had
somehow given him a glimpse of another world than this,--of an infinite
depth of beauty and of quiet somewhere,--somewhere,--a depth of quiet
and rest and love. Looking up now, it became strangely real. The sun had
sunk quite below the hills, but his last rays struck upward, touching
the zenith. The fog had risen, and the town and river were steeped in
its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened
like a cleft ocean,--shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of
billowy silver reined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of
glancing light. Wolfe's artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of
that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world
of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine,
of mill-owners and mill-hands?

A consciousness of power stirred within him. He stood up. A man,--he
thought, stretching out his hands,--free to work, to live, to love!
Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his
nervous fingers took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the
mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved
exis